I recently spoke with Tim Tuttle, the CEO of Expect Labs, a company that operates at the vanguard of two computing categories: Voice recognition (a field populated by established vendors like Nuance Communications, Apple, and Google) and what we can call the Intelligent Assistant space (which is probably most popularly demonstrated by IBM’s “Jeopardy”-winning Watson). In their own words, Expect Labs leverages “language understanding, speech analysis, and statistical search” technologies to create digital assistant solutions.

Expect Labs built the application MindMeld to make the conversations people have with one another "easier and more productive” by integrating voice recognition with an intelligent assistant on an intuitive tablet application. They have coined the term “Anticipatory Computing Engine” to describe their solution, which offers users a new kind of collaboration environment. (Expect Labs aims to provide an entire platform for this type of computing).

David Aponovich and I recently published a Forrester Wave™ on web content management for digital customer experience. In this videocast, David and I talk about how we did the research that went into the report, how the market has evolved since the last version of the report, the biggest surprises from our findings, and highlights (and lowlights) from customer references for the evaluated products.

I recently analyzed 60 companies in India to understand the CIO reporting structure and the key projects that these organizations are focused on. Some interesting findings from this exercise:

• Currently, 40% of Indian CIOs or top IT executives report to CEOs or the senior-most person (president, managing director, etc.) in their organization. Among the other 60%, most report to CFOs (35%), followed by COOs, group CIOs, and chief sales officers.
• CIOs who report to CEOs tend to have a 30% higher IT budget than CIOs who report to CFOs, COOs, or group CIOs.
• Projects led by CIOs not reporting directly to the CEO focus primarily on reducing IT costs and aligning IT to the business; these projects are typically measured in terms of cost savings.
• Projects led by CIOs reporting directly to the CEO are more likely to focus on customer acquisition and retention and measured more in terms of business outcomes for the organization.

Source: BBC / Paul Butler

Social media platforms like Facebook and Google+ are fast becoming a big topic for business. Consumers are embracing these communication and collaboration channels for more than just sharing holiday memories. Most of us also expect to use these collaboration channels increasingly in our work environments to improve the information flow. We want to communicate at work as we are used to communicating when off work – with or without the consent of our employers. Communication culture is part of business culture and work flexibility and as such impacts any business’ endeavor to attract and retain creative talent.

For IT and business leaders, these social dynamics bring their own opportunities and challenges, as social media communication:

• Provides an innovative and attractively priced communication infrastructure.Top management and business line managers alike increasingly recognize that social media forms a fundamental channel for informal communications. Social media offers cost effective collaboration and communication channels.
• Opens collaboration channels for supplier relationships. Large businesses do not collaborate with large companies only but also with smaller ones – and vice versa. Large enterprises interact with small suppliers or smaller customers that increasingly use social media collaboration solutions.
• Morphs into collaboration ecosystems.The emerging communication and collaboration solutions are based on the convergence of services (like document collaboration) by one provider, with communication and collaboration solutions (like voice, screen sharing, and instant messaging) from another provider in a partnership-type model.